that's the challenge i gave to the speaker today, speaker boehner. let the house vote. if they voted overwhelmingly, mr. president, one republican suggested, one republican house member that more than half of the republicans in the house would vote for giving the tax security to people who make less than $250,000 a year. so i say let's have speaker boehner call upon the republicans in the house to add 25 or so votes to what the democrats would do, and you'd have 218 votes and we could go on to taking care of the fiscal cliff. mr. president, my friend protests too much. the senate is broken and needs to be fixed and we need to change the rules. we change them all the time. last year we changed the rules. why? because, mr. president, what they were doing -- republicans -- just to stop and slow down everything, after two cloture votes -- remember that takes a long time to file two cloture petitions, a couple of days and then 30 hours. two cloture votes, 60 hours. you would think the debate was all over. oh, no, what they decided they were going to do is suspend the rules a